Archive/File: holocaust/reviews evidence.evil Last-Modified: 1993/12/28 Magazine: The New Yorker Issue: November 15, 1993 Title: Evidence of Evil Author: Timothy W. Ryback A REPORTER AT LARGE The Nazis tried to destroy their death camps so that there would be no evidenc of their atrocities. Fifty years later, Auschwitz and the terrible relics it holds are disintegrating, and historians and survivors are now faced with unprecedented questions about how to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. ------------------- Today, half a century after the Second World War, as time and nature conspire against the remaining physical evidence for the Holocaust, other equally corrosive forces are at work on that most crucial of all Holocaust legacies--human memory. In Europe and North America, a growing number of revisionist "historians" claim that many assumptions about the Holocaust are based on faulty or insufficient evidence--that, in the words of one revisionist, "a hank of hair and a jar full of ashes" are not sufficient proof that the Germans exterminated an estimated 12 million people. All though Holocaust revisionism has lurked on the fringe of public consciousness since the nineteen-fifties (in Germany, revisionists refer the Holocaust as the Auschwitz-Luge, or Auchscwitz lie), over the past decade the revisionist have popularized their cause in a series of spectacular courtroon cases in Germany, France, Canada, and the United States. In France, the Conseil d'Etat, the country's highest administrative court, has repeatedly ruled against the revisionists. In some cases banning their writing and imposing stiff fines. "Such writings are not only a perverse expression of anti-Semitism, but also an aggression against the dead, the survivors, and society at large, " Roger Errera, a member of the Conseil d'Etat has written in defense of his court's decisions. "Their aim is the destruction of the dead's only 'grave,' that is, our memory, and the erosion of all awareness of the crime itself. Such an agression is not to be tolerated." The eminent French literary historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet has denounced the revisionists as "assassins de la memoire." Despite their setbacks in courtrooms, however, the revisionist have made dramatic inroads into the public consciousness in recent years. Last spring, a Roper poll published in the Boston Globe indicated that one out of three Americans believes it possible that the Holocaust never took place. The revisionist pressure has become so great that two years ago, Auschwitz museum officials, in order they said, "to counter claims in the West that the Holocaust did not take place" retested samples of hair and portions of the gas chamber walls for Zyklon B. The wall fragments still revealed the presence of the poisonous gas, but the hair, after years of washing and treatment, had been leached of all cyanide residues. The revisionists plaint is deceptively simple. They ask for one incontrovertible piece of evidence -- the proverbial "smoking gun" --that can prove that the Nazis devised and executed a policy of genocide in Europe. Revisionists it must be stated, do not deny the presence of crematoriums in the camps, or the fact that millions of people may have died in the camps from exhaustion, hunger, or disease, or the fact that Zyklon B was used in gas chambers to delouse clothing, but they adamantly reject the notion that human loves were deliberately, systematically, destroyed. And they challenge at every turn the veracity of eyewitness testimony, whether from Holocaust survivors, including inmates who manned the gas chambers and ovens, or from S.S. guards and camp officials. Revisionists claim that this testimony, including the dramtic memoirs of Rudolph Hess is often biased or distorted and has been elicited under duress. According to Mark Weber, who is the editor of the Journal for Historical Review, a prominent revisionist publication issued six times a year by the California-based Institute for Historical Review, the over-turning of the conviction of John Demjanjuk in an Israeli courtroon this past summer further advances the revisionist claim. "Here you have five individulas who swore under oath in court, sometimes shouting, that this man was Ivan the Terrible," Weber said to me shortly after the trial. "This turned out not to be true. One should be skeptical about the testimony of Holocaust survivors." This is exactly the point that revisionists have been making for over a decade. ---end of excerpt--- ------------------------------------------------------------ The contents of this file are copyright 1993 by the publisher in whose directory this file appeared. Unauthorized copying of this information is strictly forbidden. Please read the general notice at the top menu of the Gopher Server for the Electronic Newsstand. For information regarding reprints, please send mail to REPRINTS@Enews.Com ------------------------------------------------------------
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